5. Traces of a path
My dearest Pedro,
The summer days have become so calm and languorously Rohmerian since we started this correspondence. On such a pretty day we, in Romania, commemorate Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day – and thinking of it, I realized that even though cinema has always grappled with representing the “unrepresentable” (Resnais, Lanzmann), it has never approached the particular suffering endured by what is still the most maligned and discriminated ethnic group living in Europe, in conditions which should be morally repugnant and scandalizing for each and every one of us.
As you’ve guessed, I too share your conviction that cinema will be fine. Recently, an article popped onto my newsfeed that broke my contemplative state and annoyed me - because, in a sense, it proves some of the things we discussed earlier in our correspondence. It was an interview with a big-muscle “indie film” producer who was saying that “it’s very clear that independent cinema is over”. I couldn’t help myself and wrote the following: “Person seemingly not in touch with any young people declares independent cinema dead, part 7500. Cinema has survived worse moments in the history of mankind.” (Indeed, it has even flourished in their aftermath.) If these people think that what they’re making is an actually independent cinema, they’re at the very least delusional.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m saying something new. Stan Brakhage detailed a similar thought in a brilliant text I came across recently: “I really didn't understand the distinction between this ‘independent’ cinema and Hollywood (…) not content with having ripped off artistic and poetic and experimental and avant-garde and every other term they thought [of], they usurped ’independent’ which is about the last term we had.” And that’s precisely what the above producer is edifying, and by extension, all of the “critical” voices who are in fact annexed by the big-budget filmmaking “business”: for them, independent film is a question of finances, not one of content. Independent cinema, dare I say, will never, ever be over - and it will always find its means.
Which is to say, yes – some of the “totemic monsters” are in trouble right now, and they will continue to be. However, I think this is a unique moment for a radical (which I use here in the sense of root) action. Us “mere mortals” can (re)learn the unique lessons of Brakhage and his New American Cinema Group cohorts, which apply both to filmmaking, as well as to film-watching, film distribution and, hell, even film criticism. (What I do believe is that the biggest crisis we have to deal with right now is the crisis of cinephilia, in the senses in which Assayas outlines it - that it getting is increasingly further away from the center of contemporary debates, and its increasing ossification and self-isolation in institutions and lack of any major theoretical breakthrough in past decades is to blame.)
Just as you said: we must create, mutate, and keep everything that's worth alive – and I think we already have some of the blueprints. And so, I obstinately believe that things will be more than fine. We won’t be able to see this right away, of course, which rather puts the onus on patience rather than on expectation (oh, Lav!) – but haven’t we all become a bit more accustomed to waiting as of late?
Our performance (or, at least mine) is coming to an end. As with any admission of a fictional superstructure, in the end, one caves into its beckoning song and participates in it.
And so I leave to you the Grand Finale –
All my love –
Flavia